Eric Sykes

Eric Sykes, the comedian, who has died aged 89, became a national figure
through his long-running television partnership with Hattie Jacques.

The series, entitled either plain Sykes or Sykes and a [whatever was the theme of that week’s episode], ran from 1960 to 1965 — at which point Sykes announced that he was finished with it for ever — and then from 1972 to 1979. As the scriptwriter, Sykes was able to create his own comic persona, compounded of natural diffidence, an eagerness to please, and an infallible tendency to get things wrong. But somehow the character’s innate optimism survived all disasters.

The show’s action frequently turned upon a new “toy” (such as a recently installed telephone) or a bright idea (such as running a bus route that stopped at individual people’s homes) which Sykes and his screen sister would explore unto disaster. Richard Wattis was the arrogant next-door neighbour, and Derek Guyler the local policeman.

Sykesresponded to Hattie Jacques’s tyranny with unfailing stoicism, though he would wince with visible pain as his large, loud-mouthed but not unaffectionate sister examined the fruits of his domestic labours and inevitably found them wanting.

Confronted with such a commanding personality, he seldom ventured into insubordination, and tried to carry on smiling in the face of every humiliation — though he would occasionally risk a sotto voce oath, or a black look when his persecutor turned away.

It was innocent, gentle humour that charmed rather than savaged, and wisely never sought to transgress its own bounds. If Sykes was never really at ease in any other character, his performance sufficed to make him one of Britain’s most popular comedians. Offstage, though, he seemed a good deal more complex, with a reputation for coldness and quick temper. “It’s looking so miserable as keeps me funny,” he once remarked.

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The son of a millworker, Eric Sykes was born at Oldham on May 4 1923. He would develop a belief that all the best comics hailed from the north-west of the country. “My theory is that we are all idiots,” he explained. “The people who don’t think they’re idiots — they’re the ones that are dangerous.”

Eric’s mother, who had been gaining a reputation in musical comedy, died at his birth, and he was brought up by a stepmother in conditions of extreme poverty, never having a bed to himself before he joined the RAF. At Ward Street Central School, he discovered a talent for making people laugh as a defence against bullying and went on to do comic turns in the pub. He also played the drums in his own Blue Sparks quartet.

Unable to take up an art scholarship, at 14 Sykes left school and took up odd jobs in a cotton mill and at a greengrocer's. In 1941, four days before his 18th birthday, he joined the RAF. Trained as a wireless officer, he served on the beaches of Normandy (where the noise of the guns affected his hearing) and at the siege of Caen, and was present at the German surrender on Luneberg Heath.

Sykes also had the opportunity to join an entertainments section run by the actor Bill Fraser, later Snudge in the television series Bootsie and Snudge. Sykes then joined a show put on by Army Welfare Services, which created some confusion over his status: his RAF unit had been disbanded and the Army gave him a 15cwt truck to drive round Germany until he found a unit from which he could be demobbed. Eventually his case was raised in the House of Commons, with the happy upshot that he was discharged six months after he had been due for release but with two years’ back pay.

The only way, he felt, that the country would get another crop of comedy writers such as himself, Spike Milligan, Dennis Norden and Johnny Speight would be to have another war. He considered that the war afforded valuable experience for a comedian, better perhaps than that acquired by modern comics, straight down from university.

After the war Sykes wrote scripts for Bill Fraser and worked for the Oldham Rep. Sacked for demanding a pay rise from £3 to £4, he toured the variety halls. Then Frankie Howerd invited him to provide material for the radio show Variety Bandbox. “Stick to writing,” was Howerd’s advice.

Sykes was soon working for Tony Hancock and Hattie Jacques, both of whom he met on the Educating Archie series. He was also occasionally called upon to emulate Spike Milligan as scriptwriter for The Goon Show. Nevertheless, he always longed to perform on his own account.

His first television appearances were as an incompetent compère, but from 1960, when he went on the air, there were no more doubts about his potential as an actor. And after his show finished in 1965, he went on stage to play another victim — this time a timidly obliging factory worker who was the butt of Jimmy Edwards’s roaring red-faced bully in the theatrical romp Big Bad Mouse.

The show had two separate West End runs. Edwards’s and Sykes’s genius for ad-libbing allowed them to indulge all kinds of spontaneous humour as Sykes found himself suspected of lechery and Edwards bore down upon him as the magistrate. Those who saw Big Bad Mouse more than once were liable to see two different shows.

The Daily Telegraph’s Eric Shorter asked. “When was an evening constructed with such a deliberate yet delightful determination to veer away from the original without losing its theatrical impulse? And when was there a display of such farcical timing that our applause for it stops the show again and again?”

But around 1979 Sykes’s television career began to run into the sands. In that year his show with Hattie Sykes ended (she died in 1980), and it was 10 years before he was given another television series, and then not by the BBC (towards which he had come to feel some bitterness) but by Television South West.

This was The Nineteenth Hole, written by Johnny Speight, in which Sykes, a keen golfer in real life, played a male chauvinist secretary at a smart golf club. The series was soon dropped as racist, sexist and unfunny, rather giving the lie to Sykes’s habitual claim that he represented good, clean British humour.

From the 1970s Sykes had increasing trouble with deafness and his balance. He had lost most of the hearing in his right ear after a mastoid operation in 1952 (his future wife, a Canadian, was one of the nurses), and in 1963 he underwent further surgery to save the hearing of his left ear. Later in his career he wore spectacles as a concealed hearing aid.

But not much seemed to go right. In 1977 The Eric Sykes Show, for ITV, showed only that the meek and mild personality which he had so carefully built up hardly suited the big time. As for the BBC: “Every time I suggest something, it seems to get shelved,” he complained in 1985. Increasingly he worked abroad, in Canada, Australia, South Africa, Zimbabwe and New Zealand, often in his own show, A Hatful of Sykes.

Big Bad Mouse was finally abandoned in 1981 after a poor reception in Australia. That year Sykes played the first of several pantomime seasons as a surprisingly cantankerous Alderman Fitzwarren in Dick Whittington at the Wimbledon Theatre. But in 1985 he had to pull out of the same pantomime at Aberdeen, after collapsing at his home. In 1995 he toured in Two of a Kind, with Sir John Mills.

He directed a number of films with an emphasis on visual humour, notably The Plank (1979), with Arthur Lowe and a cameo role for Frankie Howerd, and Rhubarb (1969), which featured Harry Secombe, Jimmy Edwards and Hattie Jacques.

Sykes had long acted in the cinema, and was especially good as a gipsy in Heavens Above (1963) and as Terry-Thomas’s factotum in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965). His other film credits included The Bargee (1963), One-Way Pendulum (1964), Rotten to the Core (1965), Shalako (1968), Monte Carlo or Bust (1969) and The Boys in Blue (1983).

Despite his disability, he continued to work into old age, appearing alongside Nicole Kidman in the film The Others (2001) and in the same year starring in the West End farce Caught In The Net. In 2003 he appeared in productions of The Three Sisters and As You Like It. He continued to take small roles on television in series such as Heartbeat and New Tricks.

He published several books, including Sykes of Sebastopol Terrace (1981), about his famous television series; two novels, The Great Crime of Grapplewick (1997) and Smelling of Roses (1998); and a memoir, If I Don’t Write It, Nobody Else Will (2005).

In the 1960s Sykes lived on St George’s Hill, Weybridge, next door to John Lennon. Later he moved to Esher. He also owned a large Edwardian building in Bayswater, with floors of offices including his own.

He was appointed OBE in 1986 and CBE in 2005 .

Eric Sykes married, on Valentine’s Day 1952, Edith Milbrandt; they had a son and three daughters.